Inside Sunderland's encouraging summer of quiet evolution - and why it shows us how much has changed

If it seems a little unfamiliar to be talking about Sunderland landing two key summer transfer targets before pre-season has even begun, well, that’s because it very much is.

The Black Cats confirmed on Wednesday night that their long pursuit of Jobe Bellingham had reached a successful conclusion, with the midfielder set to complete the formalities of his move when he returns from international duty 

He has, incidentally, been sharing the England U18’s captain’s armband with now Wearside team-mate Zak Johnson - another coup for the club given the general dominance of the big Premier League academies in those international youth teams. Earlier in the day, the club confirmed that its latest Academy audit had resulted in Category One status being retained.

Sunderland’s summer of quiet evolution is well and truly under way. 

Bellingham became the club’s second addition of the summer, less than a week after confirmation that a deal had been struck to beat off significant Championship competition for talented Australian youngster Nectarios Triantis. 

The expectation at this stage is that Luis Semedo, a 19-year-old striker who has come through the Benfica academy, will be the next before too long.

It is of course inevitable that Sunderland, like every other team in the second tier, will do some of their significant transfer business later in the window and most probably after the Championship season has begun. That is simply the reality of life outside of the Premier League, whose clubs will take many of their best talented youngsters on their pre-season tours and who will hold onto their fringe players until their own incoming business has been concluded. If the Black Cats want to do a deal like the one that brought Amad to Wearside on loan last year, then they will almost certainly have to wait.

The likelihood all the same is that when the first-team squad reconvene for pre-season training later this month, the bulk of Tony Mowbray’s squad for the campaign ahead will be in place.

This, for Sunderland, is borderline unprecedented in recent times. They moved quickly last summer to secure some key contractual agreements (Gooch, Wright, Roberts) but their first external arrival came on June 30th, when Dan Ballard arrived from Arsenal.

The summer previous saw Alex Pritchard become the club’s arrival on July 9th, but supporters will remember that much of the significant business was not done until August as Lee Johnson started the campaign (successfully) with Carl Winchester and Dan Neil as full backs. COVID-19 made the previous season impossible as a point of comparison, but broadly speaking it was a similar story and in Sunderland’s second season in League One, the takeover uncertainty then engulfing the club meant that business did not begin in earnest until July and Jack Ross was left working against the clock and with little support. In the previous campaign a flurry of free agent signings were made in June but such was the turmoil of the club following its relegation, the squad was still not even close to being complete when pre-season began. When the team set out for Portugal on their pre-season camp, they barely had enough players for an 8-a-side game.

For the first time in recent memory, stability off the pitch has allowed for Sunderland to be proactive, now concluding deals that have been months in the making. 

How Bellingham or Triantis fare in the years to come is of course unknown, but their confidence in signing for Sunderland tells you how the perception of the club has been transformed over the last two years. Kristjaan Speakman once spoke of the symbolic importance of selecting Callum Doyle in the early weeks of that promotion season: Doyle was a fine player well worth his place in the team, but it was also a strong signal that this was a new Sunderland ready to play a certain way and to do so with young players at the start of their careers.

Mowbray has taken that to a new level in a higher division and Sunderland are reaping the rewards; Triantis’ agent said recently that positive talks with the head coach and head of recruitment Stuart Harvey were key to the deal being done.

Sunderland can offer players a compelling vision of exactly where they will fit into a settled team and style, and they can do that because they finally have stability in terms of their budgets and their staffing.

If there has been one slightly odd subplot to an otherwise hugely encouraging few months, it was around the speculation over Mowbray’s future that clearly unsettled the head coach and which the club hierarchy seemingly did not a great deal to quell. As such it would be a stretch to say the situation is emphatically resolved, but with Mowbray involved in transfer talks and pre-season now looming, it seems clear that he will continue. Regardless of the journey to that point, and one suspects we may hear more about that further down the line, it will help boost the positivity even further at the start of the season: Mowbray has proven to be a superb figurehead for his young squad and its supporters.

Slight uncertainty, too, has understandably come from the obvious Premier League interest in some key players. Most would acknowledge this is in a way a hugely positive development, reflective of a club finally cultivating talent and putting players on an upward trajectory. Where the obvious concern comes is that with Amad back at Manchester United, key departures could significantly weaken Mowbray’s hand.

Behind the scenes, though, there is confidence that proactive contract management has left Sunderland in a very strong position, and the noises are that this is not a window in which the club have to sell unless the fees are transformative. 

None of which is to say that success is guaranteed next season.

Given the likely strength of the sides being promoted from League One and relegated from the Premier League, it will be an achievement merely to match last season’s sixth-placed finish, particularly when you consider there will be other teams still benefiting from parachute payments.

Up front there are still significant questions to answer even if Semedo signs, as Ross Stewart enters the final year of his deal with an extension still seemingly no closer to being secured. More broadly, there can be no guarantees as to whether such a young group can produce the level of consistency required to challenge further up the table across what will be another gruelling 46-game campaign. 

It is shaping up to be one of the strongest Championship fields in recent memory, and though Sunderland’s ambition and budget is growing steadily, there will be deeper and more expensively-squads squads elsewhere. 

To Sunderland’s advantage will be that from day one, they will have relative familiarity in personnel and in what they are trying to do.

So often the summer talk on Wearside has been of uncertainty, tumult and revolutions nigh. The turnover will be far smaller this time around, and that tells you that this is a very different club these days. Pre-season excitement is finally beginning to offset the trepidation, though there will of course be some of that along the way. It’s still Sunderland, after all.